Yrupẽ

Candela Sotos
Spain | 2025 | 79 min
World premiere
Language : Spanish
Subtitles : English, French

The search for La Flor de Irupé, a lost film by Guillermo Zúñiga, a Spanish pioneer of scientific filmmaking who was exiled in Argentina after the Spanish Civil War, triggers a journey into family histories and national archives. As we witness the slow growth of the yrupé plant, images and silences emerge, revealing layers of historical concealment and censorship.

Biologist by training, frontline photographer during the Spanish Civil War, pioneer of scientific cinema, Communist partisan in France, escapee from a concentration camp, assistant to avant-garde filmmaker Jean Painlevé, producer in exile in Argentina of some of Peronist cinema’s biggest hits, collaborator of Buñuel and Saura in Spain—the life of Guillermo Fernández-Zúñiga reads like a whirlwind epic that no single series could ever fully capture. His is one of those extraordinary, adventurous biographies that only the 20th century could have conjured. His great-niece, filmmaker Candela Sotos, chooses to home in on a particularly resonant chapter of this incredible life: La flor de Irupé, a short botanical film from the 1950s, long believed lost.
The metaphor of the water flower proves especially fitting for this spellbinding work of historical and familial investigation. Delving deep into archives of all kinds—rich, rare, and long clouded by silence and censorship—Sotos undertakes a meticulous immersion. From these obscured waters, a truth long buried begins to surface and, at last, blooms: revealing the long-hidden secret at the heart of the film and the man behind it.
Sergio Fant

Yrupẽ, 2025
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